deschutes · HackerTrans

hace 29 díasdiscuss

What is so objectionable about data centers anyway? That they consume utilities without employing a substantial amount of people? Compared to actual manufacturing like fabs the pollution concerns are laughable. The water use issue seems to be a wedge.

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hace 3 mesesdiscuss

It's hard to find anyone that doesn't have some motivation in this problem. I won't claim any percentages because I do not know them and I would not trust them even if I did.

That said, my experience in a urban area on the west coast has given me many examples that support this notion that it's not just a housing problem. Indeed many of the local governments own attempts to house the unhoused fail in no small part because the unhoused create conditions incompatible with staying housed.

Furthermore there is a steady drip of examples in regional news that raise serious questions about the efficacy if not motivations of the judiciary, politicians, law enforcement and local beuracracies charged with addressing the problem.

I do believe that housing costs are a major part of the problem but I also believe that treating the population as if they have no obligations to society is a major and fatal mistake to the whole enterprise. For one the policy approach has invited contagion by not addressing the population of unhoused that cannot or will not uphold the most basic aspects of the social contract. For two, it turns away a large number of people that would otherwise be sympathetic to the cause.

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hace 6 mesesdiscuss

It sounds like std::atomic_ref<T>::{load,store}(relaxed) to me. 1. ad-hoc atomicity with ref 2. no ordering

https://godbolt.org/z/4h893P7hG

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hace 10 mesesdiscuss

You cannot use the rust standard library in environments where arbitrary allocations may fail but neither can you use the STL. The difference is the rust standard library doesn't pretend that it has some reasonable way to deal with allocation failure. std::bad_alloc is mainly a parlor trick used to manufacture the idea that copy and move fallibility are reasonable things.

I wouldn't wager a nickel on someone's life if it depended on embedded STL usage.

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hace 10 mesesdiscuss

You are correct, it does not affect the lifetime of the pointed object (pointee).

But a shared_ptr manages at least 3 things: control block lifetime, pointee lifetime, and the lifetime of the underlying storage. The weak pointer shares ownership of the control block but not the pointee. As I understand this is because the weak_ptr needs to modify the control block to try and lock the pointer and to do so it must ensure the control block's lifetime has not ended. (It manages the control blocks lifetime by maintaining a weak count in the control block but that is not really why it shares ownership.)

As a bonus trivia, make_shared uses a single allocation for both the control block and the owned object's storage. In this case weak pointers share ownership of the allocation for the pointee in addition to the control block itself. This is viewed as an optimization except in the case where weak pointers may significantly outlive the pointee and you think the "leaked" memory is significant.

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hace 12 mesesdiscuss

Average citizen on receipt of news that swiss business is impaired

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el año pasadodiscuss

If you squint hard enough, any potentially allocating function is fallible. This observation has motivated decades of pointless standards work defending against copy or initialization failure and is valuable to the people who participate in standardization for that reason alone.

For practitioners it serves mainly as a pointless gotcha. In safety critical domains the batteries that come with c++ are useless and so while they are right to observe this would be a major problem there they offer no real relief.

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el año pasadodiscuss

Assuming memory is infinite for the purposes of a program is a very reasonable assumption for the vast majority of programs. In the rare contexts where you need to deal with the allocation failure it comes at a great engineering cost.

It's not really what this is about IMV. The vast majority of unrecoverable errors are simply bugs.

A context free example many will be familiar with is a deadlock condition. The programmer's mental model of the program was incomplete or they were otherwise ignorant. You can't statically eliminate deadlocks in an arbitrary program without introducing more expensive problems. In practice programmers employ a variety of heuristics to avoid them and just fix the bugs when they are detected.

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hace 2 añosdiscuss

Trying to apply heuristics like patterns to this problem is attacking the wrong thing. It boils down to a lack of belonging, trust and motivation of reviewers to do the right thing. Absentee leadership not holding engineers accountable for their inaction or slow walking of reviews being the enabler.

This kind of dysfunction happens more often on teams with incompetent people in control but sometimes temporarily happens on otherwise high functioning teams when multiple people are fighting over philosophical control of the project.

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hace 2 añosdiscuss

Be that as it may, from cursory research, there is a body of US law on these kinds of practices under the term "commercial bribery". I can't speak to the legal details at all but this doesn't seem to be a case of an honest person getting mixed up in the legal system. Rather the opposite in my view.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_bribery

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hace 2 añosdiscuss

This is exactly the kind of scenario that the foreign corrupt practices act identifies as a crime. It would be kind of ironic if it wasnt recognized as a crime in the US.

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hace 2 añosdiscuss

Author is untrustworthy and misrepresenting the actual details of the purported misdeeds if the sources cited in this thread are accurate.

Whether or not there is some legal argument that he didn't violate his employment contract anyone would recognize the conflict of interest at the heart of those transactions as fraud. Seems like the feds or Amazon just bungled the case.

This is funny to juxtapose with Neil Gorsuch giving accounts of honest people getting tied up in criminal cases or byzantine regulations for reasonable behavior. Hard to escape the conclusion the system is tuned to reward those with resources rather than find justice.

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hace 2 añosdiscuss

It may be obvious but rarely is it the focus of public discourse on drug companies. Basically the only thing that gets discussed is the apparent naked greed of drug research companies. Frankly it's a miracle that we have private companies bringing novel and life changing drugs to market, and the ability to make obscene profits off these massively speculative investments is probably the main reason.

That's not to dismiss criticism of them, but to me it's obvious, especially if you take a slightly longer view that these companies are in fact making lives better.

The real estate market is a much better example of the harmful effects of terminal greed. Unfortunately so much of the population is in on it now nobody has the fucking balls to stop the music.

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hace 2 añosdiscuss

It's a creative thought but this kind of thinking is in direct contradiction to the widely accepted principles of safe firearm handling. Trying to mitigate the damage of negligent discharges is the wrong problem to solve. In this case it sounds like the negligence may belong to the manufacturer in which case these weapons should be scrapped.

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hace 2 añosdiscuss

I think the dark side of it is unintentional ADL but it's mostly good. C++ gets a lot of mileage out of concepts in templates. The newer language feature just makes the existing practice first class as something a bit beyond syntactic sugar. But the design of the STL relies heavily on the idea that if something has the requisite properties it is that thing. Iterators are probably the most prominent example. You won't find any explicit iterator types. It's just a set of properties that a type has that makes it an iterator or not. Personally I've never seen confusion be an issue. Granted the iterator and algorithm design has been mostly superceded by newer apis that operate as pipes of functions over streams. Frankly the experience of these are poor in C++ for various reasons.

One big example is that keys in associative collections are const qualified even when moving from the collection. The constness doesn't match the expectation users have when consuming a collection and is unfixable within the constraints of the STL. Anyway it results in awful type checking errors. The whole library is full of these foot guns and most of them result in bizarre behavior or horrible error messages.

Iterators have their own warts but IMO work much better within the C++ type system. Here's a fun one. Reverse iterators have their own set of invalidation properties which are typically weaker and different than forward iterators. Due to various reasons they actually refer to the element that precedes (in reverse sequence) the one you'll get when dereferencing it. So end is rfront and front is rend.

In either case the experience is quite bad compared to the stream apis you get from rust. But I don't think this is a mark against concepts, just a dated design and the limits of the type system and semantics of the language.

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hace 2 añosdiscuss

This seems to be saying nothing. constexpr allows you to maintainably express the computation of a constant. This is useful, even if it morally is a script generating that constant it's valuable to not need to drag along a bunch of extra stuff to maintain a program.

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hace 2 añosdiscuss

To my understanding there is and there isn't. The driving force behind this demonstrated that it was possible to speed up the existing CPython interpreter by more than the performance cost of free threading with changes to the allocator and various other things.

So the net is actually a small performance win but lesser than if there was no free threading. That said, many of the techniques he identified were immediately incorporated into CPython and so I would expect benchmarks to show some regression as compared with the single threaded interpreter of the previous revision.

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hace 2 añosdiscuss

Better odds and no work at a game of chance. That's pretty damning.

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hace 2 añosdiscuss

Have you ever taken a cab?

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hace 2 añosdiscuss

As far as design and ergonomics go, I'd compare servicelogs to a pile of trash that may yet grow massive enough to accrete into a planetoid.

A text based format whose sole virtue is descending from a system that was composed mainly of bugs that had coalesced into perl scripts.

It's not the basis of something you could even give away, let alone have people willingly pay you for their agony. Cloudwatch being rather alike in this regard.

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